He went on shivering, straight before him as he happened to have turned his face when he came round the corner of the house. He was not aware that there was more choice in it than this, though all the while there was a dormant intention in his mind of going to Wyburgh after all, and trying, one last effort, what Uncle Henry would do for him. Uncle Henry had been kind to him, as kind as he knew how. He was only an old bachelor, not much good, a selfish old fellow, thinking most of his own comfort; but still he had been kind; and perhaps if he knew fully the state of the case, and how the people at White House had treated his pupil and godson--This was lying underneath as it were the current of Harry’s thoughts, and turned over and came uppermost for a moment now and then; but it did not become at all a principal idea until he had walked a long way, and had got warm with walking, and the sense of absolute misery, physical and mental, had been slightly modified. At first he kept to the side of the Fells, which was rough walking, and where now and then there was a dyke to jump over or a beck to cross; but by and by got down to the high road, almost groping the way with his feet, if not with his hands, so black lay the night over the irregular broken ground. He knew the road, every inch, he would have said; but when that darkness comes down like a pall, confounding everything in one gloom, there is little advantage in knowledge. Sometimes he found himself right up against the grey uncemented stones of a dyke before he was aware of any obstacle, and sometimes had almost plunged into an invisible hill-side stream, before the little warning trickle it made among the stones caught his ear. By the side of one of these little streams he made his way to the road, and there for the first time asked himself where he was going. What a strange walk it was, all blank about him, sometimes a lonely tree rustling, betraying itself in the dark by the wind in its spare branches, sometimes a cottage suggested on the roadside, or away among the fields, by the cry of a child or the bark of a dog. He knew he had passed through the first hamlet on his way, because the dogs all woke at the unusual sound of a footstep, and barked at him lustily. He was not a youth of much imagination, and yet this incident had the most curious effect upon him. He was more startled, more shocked and annoyed by it than by anything else that had happened to him. The very dogs! was he already to them a tramp, a wandering vagrant? At the very end of the “town” some one opened a window, and Harry heard a querulous question, not addressed to himself, but to some one inside, “Wha’s that wandering on the road in the dead o’ the night?” Harry slunk by, trying to keep his steps from making so much noise. A sense of disreputableness suddenly came over him, a recollection of what people would think. Nobody would believe he had been turned out of his home for no fault of his. And then in the midst of his fury and desire for vengeance, there suddenly came over Harry that family pride which so seldom abandons a Northcountryman. Was he going to let everybody know what disgrace there was in the White House, and how his father had turned him out of doors? Were all the tongues in the country-side to be set wagging on this subject? The Joscelyns--people so well known! Harry felt as if some one had struck him sharply with his hand in the darkness. It would be all over the country in twenty-four hours. Joscelyn of White House had turned his youngest son out of doors. There was no second family of the name to confuse gossip. Harry felt as if the barking of the dogs was but a foretaste of what was going to happen to him. He felt as if some one had grasped him, choked him, tried to strangle him in the dark.